NGOs, Voluntourism, Cambodia, and Life Lessons

Posts categorized under Social Entrepreneurship

Over course of the last year, I’d met with dozens of start-up founders and examined a range of business models looking for something that struck me as “paradigm-shifting” or “game-changing” or whatever other exaggerated and over-used term you’d like to put forth. None struck me as much as a team I met that was committed […]

The post below is a comment written in response to a Harvard Business Review article “Businesses Serving the Poor Need to Get Over Their Unease About Profit” by Erik Simanis. The article uses examples of products designed for high-volumes low-margin sales strategies which failed and counters that with micro-finance as an example of high margin BoP […]

I see the future of travel for the discerning traveler as moving more into the educational travel space. Imagine hotels with professors-in-residence, curated happy hour discussions on current issues and ethical debates, in-room learning opportunities through iPads or touch screens linking to unique learning tours, nightly guest lectures, hands-on workshops, a co-working space where local […]

Walking through the Skoll World Forum last week was like watching the ingredients to make a cake get mixed in a bowl. Each had been hand picked and was being mixed together to make something no one part could create on its own. The man mixing the pot is Jeff Skoll, a founder at Ebay […]

You probably didn’t have access to the internet as a small child. You can remember a world before “social media”. But your kids had Facebook profiles from the womb and, before they could speak, they could maneuver your mini-computer (which you call an iPhone, just to make you feel connected to a past when people […]

In business school you are surrounded by people who believe in the power of markets. There are people in my class who are passionate about freeing markets, about scaling enterprises, and about generating profits. Yet some of those SAME people are advocates of giving things away in development work. I have had countless discussions with […]

Clearly, business school is getting the better part of my time and my blog is being neglected. I have though had many posts written in my head….. my fingers just haven’t gotten to typing them! The last real post I wrote was about “social” enterprise and if the “social” is really needed and there were a […]